How 40,000 Roses Find Their Way Onto the Tonys Red Carpet

Months before the Tonys medallions were distributed to the winners, before Broadway’s brightest stars put on their finest, before, even, the nominations were announced, farmers in Colombia were thinking about the ceremony. For the past several years, the backdrop for the Tonys red carpet has been an intricately constructed floral display, donated by the premium rose purveyor Passion Roses and designed by event designer Raul Avila. And as anyone who has ever tended the delicate garden flower is aware, roses take some pre-planning.

This year, the color scheme was “shades of pink,” Dwayne Holmberg from Raul Avila Inc. explained, which means that the Bogota bushes where Passion Roses harvests their flowers were cut back months ago so that the plants were stimulated to produce the blooms in time. The company was already growing the ruby- and scarlet- and cotton-candy-colored varietals, but in order to have enough for the event, growers had to carefully time their pruning prep.

The real process kicked off closer to the date, of course. When the roses were ready to be harvested, the flowers were cut and cleaned, and then put through a dehydration process—it was described to me as a process similar to “flash freezing”—that allowed them to to be shipped without having their stems submerged. After arriving in Miami, the roses were trucked up to New York in refrigerated vehicles, where, a few days before the Tonys, they were unpacked by a team of 50 or so people and re-hydrated for a few days.

On the morning of the Tonys, a team began at 6 a.m. to construct what eventually formed the striking backdrop for the red carpet. Each flower was painstakingly inserted in a small tube filled with water. “Imagine what would happen if you didn’t do that,” Stacy Jones, who handles PR for Passion Roses, told me. “They would all be dead by the time of the ceremony.” Then they were assembled in a display that extended 197 feet and stood 9 feet tall, a vertical carpet of pink tones. This year, the arrangement will require 40,000 flowers; in past years, the designs have required up to as many as 200,000 stems. Jones estimated that the cost of the donation this year—and the company has contributed for the past several years—was $120,000. After tonight, the arrangement will be dismantled and the flowers distributed throughout the city, to hospitals and other such places.

I asked Jones what made it an appealing project for her client, given the labor and cost involved. “Broadway makes sense for roses,” she answered simply. Bravo for that.